Merging two Laravel collections

Question

My head hurts from working with Laravel collections. I have two collections:

    $dt = Carbon::now();
    $days = new Collection([]);

    /**
     * Create a calender month
     */
    for ($day = 1; $day <= $dt->daysInMonth; $day++) {
        $date = Carbon::create($dt->year, $dt->month, $day)->toDateString();
        $days->push(new Timesheet([
            'date' => $date,
        ]));
    }

    /**
     * Get all timesheets for user
     */
    $timesheets = Timesheet::where('user_id', $this->user->id)
        ->get();

\Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection ($timesheets)

#attributes: array:5 [▼
    "id" => "1"
    "user_id" => "1"
    "date" => "2016-02-22 22:05:01"
    "created_at" => "2016-02-22 22:05:01"
    "updated_at" => "2016-02-22 22:05:01"
  ]
  // ... one or more ...

I have second collection giving me all days for a given month.

\Illuminate\Support\Collection ($days)

#attributes: array:1 [▼
    "date" => "2016-02-01 00:00:00"
]
// ... and the rest of the month.

I want to merge the $days collection with the $timesheet collection preserving the values of the $timesheet collection and removing any duplicates present in the $days collection. E. g. if $timesheets already contains '2016-02-24' I do not want to merge '2016-02-24' from $days. How do I do this?

Answer 1

Use merge:

$collection1 = Model1::all();
$collection2 = Model2::all();
$mergedCollection = $collection1->merge($collection2);

Documentation

The documentation talks about using it with arrays, but looking at the method signature it will take mixed arguments. Testing it on a local install of a Laravel 4 project worked for me.